Do you shoot?

Started messing around with some long-exposure shots last night at the lake. Here are a couple I captured. Haven't done anything to them in post.



Wife and me:


Fireworks:




And a few landscape shots with long-exposure. It was pretty dark when I shot them, which I liked because of the blue:

 

Matt, good long exposure work. Personally, that's becoming one of my favorite things to do ... even though I suck at it right now (Don't have a shutter release so a lot of my shots are done with a self-timer and don't come out quite as I want them.)
Regarding the firework shots, what settings did you use? I ask only because they are a little blown out with the multiple fireworks and I was wondering if that was because of the show you were shooting (I.E. a finale and a lot of quick-moving fireworks) or because you were shooting really long exposure times.
Other than that, nice work. It's not an easy thing to do but, if done right, it can be really, really fun.

 

Most of the fireworks were finale-ish with longer times (between 3-5 seconds). I thought about doing a shorter shot, but wasn't sure how to compensate well with my ISO. ISO ranged from 400-640. I tried a few, but not much luck. They were all across the lake.
I was a little disappointed that on my camera, you can see the silhouette of the mountains well when reviewing my roll, but when I pull it into Photoshop, I have to make a lot of edits to even seen a hint of the peaks.

 

Matt, I shot some fireworks tonight. My settings were at the lowest ISO I could shoot at (ISO 100), the highest F-Stop I could shoot at (I got my best results with F22) and were in the 4-8 second range from a long exposure standpoint.
The only downside was I don't have a remote shutter release so I had to shoot all of these with the self-timer. I think they came out well overall though. Let me know what you think.
Here are some of my favorites:

 

I use exposuremanager.com and it's been worthwhile. Helps me keep my photo files better organized, encourages me to build my archive base and gets me a couple payouts each year.

 

Those are nice!

 

Dude. These are stellar.

 

Thanks. I'm kicking myself in the ass for not going back out on Sunday to one of the other firework shows but, hey, there's always next year.
It's amazing what a year of experience shooting night shots and long exposures does though. I first tried this in 2013 and the results wee only so-so but they came out MUCH better this year because I kind of know what I'm doing now.
Still need to find a fireworks show on a beach or somewhere with an incline so I can try getting some with people in them. Eh, maybe next year.

 

Also, I don't know how many of you guys out there have your own websites but I recently launched mine (It's mostly for wedding photography but there's a ton of my sports photos there as well.) If you have a free minute, check it out at www.PaulJSpetrini.com and let me know what you think.
I used Wix.com for the set-up but did almost 100% of it on my own without any HTML experience. Luckily they had some templates that were a great starting off point. I like the way it came out, though I'm still trying to find my blogging voice.

 

Maybe next summer I will promote a business where I follow a family someplace to take pictures like this...

 

I also love those fireworks shots.

 

93,

A lot of great candid moments there. Love the way you framed the photo of the kid with the face paint on.
And thanks for the fireworks compliment. I'm actually surprised they came out so well. Can't wait to get back out there and do that again.
I'm shooting a wedding today though so, fingers crossed, I'll have a lot of great pics to share here from the shoot. The client is a sportswriter whose fiance was a local news editor and they met at the paper they both worked at together. See? Who said journalism is all bad?